SCO

Hello,
How do a schedule a reboot of a SCO 5.0 box like every wednesday at 3:30 am. Doesn't have a /etc/crontab file like our Suse boxes have. Thanks for any help.

I have to ask, why do you need to reboot everyweek? Its not Windows...

It's the old story where support and site thinking if they reboot the box on a regular basis it will go faster. Well no it's a old sco box and this won't do anything, but I will do this for them to just show nothing will happen and they will need to fork out money for a new server.

Sometimes user applications leave stuff in that eventually causes the system to crash. If you had mentioned Syncronics/Realworld I would have known for certain and the weekly would have been just about right.

This is a 3 step process. First is a change in /usr/spool/cron/crontabs/root to add a line for the date and time plus the name of the file you wish to activate. I use reboot and put it in place of the standard one.
Then the reboot file itself with an init command to generate a reboot.
Then a modification to /etc/default/boot for the time delay and default level.

Mine go at 3:01 on Sunday morning to avoid the DST issue.

That is how I implemented it, could be done simpler.
Cron needs to be shut down and restarted before the mod takes effect. Or the system rebooted.

I tried to put /etc/shutdown -r now in a shell script and have cron run that, but the system didn't boot. Should I just call /etc/reboot from cron directly like

Code:

30 3 * * 3 /etc/reboot

Thanks.

<Cron needs to be shut down and restarted before the mod takes effect. Or the system rebooted.>

No, you don't all you have to reboot or restart cron, what you can do is while you are are in /usr/spool/cron/crontabs is type "crontab root", this loads the new root crontab file into the cron.